Let Me Tell You About My Team
by Inkfish
Summary: A CM Team fic centered around Hotch's conversation with Strauss in the Season 2 finale No Way Out pt.2
1. Morgan

Let Me Tell You About My Team

Chapter 1: Morgan

"_Agent Morgan fought to protect his identity from the very people who could save him. Why? Because trust has to be earned, and there are very few people he truly trusts."_

You know it's stupid. You told yourself that time and time again, even as you lied and covered up and fought to protect your past from the very people who could unravel it, the people you know – rationally – could make everything at least somewhat okay again. But you aren't thinking rationally. You are angry and afraid, and you are 10 years old again and finding the body of a boy you weren't friends with, didn't even know, and you have to fix it but you know you can't. You deal with your nightmares and you keep quiet because as long as they're yours they're just dreams, they aren't real. You have to believe that, even though you know you don't.


	2. Reid

Chapter 2: Reid

"_Reid's intellect is a shield which protects him from his emotions, and at the moment his shield is under repair."_

Statistics, and facts. You cling to them when you have nowhere else to turn and nothing else to say or think and you don't want to feel – which is often. So when they ask you "Reid, what do you think?" you go immediately for the facts and ignore what they obviously want. They want your gut instinct, but your instincts have betrayed you too many times and statistics are safe – they make you feel safe. They will keep the team safe, and they will let you continue to pretend to ignore the other things swirling around in your head. Emotions have no place in this job. You know that's not exactly true, because Hotch says its not – he says that when you stop caring, its time to walk away because you will become like the monsters you hunt – but it's not that you don't care, not exactly. You care so much that it is physically painful and that scares you so you ignore it, or you try. You act like a socially awkward human computer and you force yourself to believe that that's all you are because as soon as you acknowledge that it's not everything will change, and you're not ready for that. So you rattle off facts and ignore the knowing looks from the rest of the team and hope that your expertise on everything is important enough to them that they don't press you for more, lest you shatter under the strain.


	3. Prentiss

Disclaimer: Prentiss does not belong to me, I'm just playing with her. She and the rest of the Criminal Minds team belong to... well, whoever they belong to. I'm not entirely sure if that's the writers, the network, or what. Probably the network. But meh. Not mine. On to the story.

A/N: I'm a terrible person for abandoning you all. Life has been a little crazy, and I'm not sure I love this installment. But here goes.

Chapter 3: Prentiss

"_Prentiss overcompensates because she doesn't yet feel she's a part of the team. She needn't worry."_

It makes you feel physically ill. You can feel yourself laughing too loudly where a smile would do, touching too much, trying to connect to these people who have had only themselves for so long that you don't know if you'll ever really be a part of them. It makes it worse that you know you are expected to report on them, and you live in fear that they, stellar profilers that they are, will figure it out. You fear that they will discover your treachery and you will lose them forever and always, something that terrifies you because these are good people, people that care deeply for each other and might one day care for you. You want that, and you want it badly – you've lived your whole life in a sort of halfway kind of existence, constantly moving and traveling. You've never put down roots. You don't really know how. But this team and this place are giving you that opportunity, and you are trying to force it to happen, even though you know that it will come. You don't want to wait anymore. It's about time you are able to call someplace "Home."

A/N: Love it? Hate it? Have a better idea? Drop me a line!


	4. JJ

Disclaimer: I don't own JJ, I'm just playing with her. She and the rest of the team belong to the powers that be over at… I think it's CBS isn't it? I'm too lazy to look it up. In any case, they aren't mine.

Chapter 4: JJ

"_Every day Agent Jareau fields dozens of requests for our team, and every night she goes home hoping she has made the right choices."_

Your life is built around the piles, the endless piles. They are on your desk, on your cabinets, on the ground – stacks of files from desperate detectives and police forces around the country, begging for help. They have come to the last line of defense – and your job is to decide which of them is going to get the call that will put a smile on their face, hope in their hearts, often for the first time in weeks. Missing child cases get priority, but only for the first 24 hours – and that means a lot of files go unanswered, or get a called in profile instead of the full team that would allow them a much better chance at success. Potential serial killers have their own stack – the one with two or more files rubber banded together, the new one glaring an accusation and you wonder, you question "could I have seen this?" And then you move on. Standard murder cases go largely unanswered, and it kills you that so many families may never get the closure that they so desperately want and need, that they may never be able to fully move on without knowing, but it has to be this way. That's your mantra, after every exhausted homicide detective thanks you for your help, or at least your attention, and goes back to work to look at everything again and you can hear the defeat in his voice. And at night, when you go home, you see their faces. Not bloodied and bruised, as they are in death, but alive, laughing, hugging their families and friends. _This is how it was for them,_ you think, and _this is how it will be for others._ And then you go back to the brutal business of convincing yourself that there is a difference to be made and that your choices matter, because the second you stop believing that is the second you lose all faith.

A/N: Love it? Hate it? Have a better idea? Drop me a line!


	5. Garcia

Disclaimer: I don't own Garcia, I'm just playing with her. She and the rest of the team belong to the powers that be over at… I think it's CBS isn't it? I'm too lazy to look it up. In any case, they aren't mine.

A/N: This one gets a little dark. Like, kind of a lot. I'm not sure how I feel about that, given how cheerful Garcia usually is. This is also the longest one so far, nearly 500 words. So that an improvement, I suppose. In any case, here we go!

Chapter 4: Garcia

"_Garcia fills her office with figurines and color, to remind herself to smile as the horror fills her screens."_

Morgan once asked you how you ended up in the FBI. You had a glib comeback for him; something about hackers and lists and options, but the truth is that you ask yourself that same question every time the team takes on a new case. It always seems like there's nothing else, that you have reached the lowest circle of hell that human beings are capable of dragging each other down to, that there is no depravity you haven't seen, some sick, psychopathic bastard smacks you in the face with something that makes you swallow rapidly to avoid vomiting as you stare at the impersonal crime photos on your screens. They are stark against the bright colors that transform your cave-like office into some semblance of a workspace, distressingly out of place amongst the devil ducks and the makeshift pipe cleaner picture frames, the matching Cheshire cat grins you and JJ sport in the picture pinned to the corner of your main screen and the brightly colored Comic-Con poster Morgan got you on of the times the team went to California. The blood and death in those pictures and the horror of the lives destroyed, both killer and victim, dull the otherwise cheery nature of the room. Dealing with it requires a lot of deep breathing, a lot of minimizing the terror or looking away, taking a moment to look at something that makes you smile and maybe giggle a little bit, just to reassure yourself that you remember how.

But sometimes, at home alone, even with the TV or the radio on or curled up with a cheesy romance novel in your cheerfully colored room with your cheerfully colored pajamas and a cheerfully colored mug of something delicious, you catch yourself shuddering at the horrors of the day, fighting tears and sometimes giving way to them. The ones with big grey areas get to you the most – men who take hostages to try to get money to feed their families, women who lose their babies and take those belonging to others, people who, by virtue of their family or their upbringing or something they couldn't control, had no chance at all for a normal way of life. These are the people who get to you because you look at your life and you see all the choices that you made and that your family and friends made, the places where your life could have gone in such a different, and scarier, direction. These are the people who make you realize that if they could be terrible people, so could anyone. So could you. And then you catch yourself and shake your head violently, deny deny deny, and go back to your cheerful book and you smile at everyone the next day and add a little extra wit to your already ridiculous phone conversations, just to prove it to yourself – _no, not me. _

A/N: Love it? Hate it? Have a better idea? Drop me a line!


End file.
